Nietzsche, on the type of person who would tear down statues of Grant and Cervantes. I apologize for the long quotation, but it's really worth reproducing with as full a context as possible.
"It is not justice which here sits in judgment; even less it is mercy which here pronounces judgment: but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiably self-desiring power. Its verdict is always unmerciful, always unjust, because it has never flowed from a pure fountain of knowledge....It takes a great deal of strength to be able to live and to forget how far living and being unjust are one. Luther himself once thought that the world came to be through an oversight of God: for had God thought of "heavy artillery" he would never have created the world. Occasionally, however the same life which needs forgetfulness demands the temporary destruction of this forgetfulness; then it is to become clear how unjust is the existence of some thing, a privilege, a caste, a dynasty for example, how much this thing deserves destruction. Then its past is considered critically, then one puts the knife to its roots, then one cruelly treads all pieties underfoot. It is always a dangerous process, namely dangerous for life itself: and men or ages which serve life in this manner of judging and annihilating a past are always dangerous, and endangered men and ages. For since we happen to be the results of earlier generations we are also the results of their aberrations, passions, and errors, even crimes: it is not possible quite to free oneself from this chain. If we condemn those aberrations and think ourselves quite exempt from them, the fact that we are descended from them is not eliminated. At best we may bring about a conflict between our inherited, innate nature and our knowledge, as well as a battle between a strict new discipline and ancient education and breeding. It is an attempt, as it were, a posteriori to give oneself a past from which one would like to be descended in opposition to the past from which one is [actually] descended;-- always a dangerous attempt because it is so difficult to find a limit in denying the past and because second natures are mostly feebler than the first. Too often we stop at knowing the good without doing it because we also know the better without being able to do it. Yet here and there a victory is achieved nevertheless, and for the fighters who use critical history for life there is even a remarkable consolation; namely, to know that this first nature also was, at some time or other, a second nature and that every victorious nature becomes a first."
Basically, once you begin pulling down statues, it's difficult to stop. This is dangerous because you give rope to the people who simply hold a blind preference for new things over old, are generally ignorant, and attack the contradictions of the old society without charting any sort of workable course to a better one. Because it is most critical, it seems most just. It isn't. These people would burn it all down if they could, because it came out of a past that is inherently, irredeemably racist. Nothing is worth preserving, because they don't know anything about it beyond its awful racist qualities. It doesn't matter that Grant defeated the foremost slave power in the western hemisphere. It doesn't matter that Cervantes wrote the first modern novel and was a slave himself. If it is old, it is racist, and it must be destroyed and forgotten. Again, I apologize for the essay, but it is worth trying to diagnose this degenerate thinking as I doubt this is the last we'll see of it.
If they think American slavery was bad wait until they hear about... literally the entirety of human history.
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
idk i love reading about all the hundreds of genocides that happend in China alone
Whose quote
Joyce wrote it.
Morrissey probably stole it
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yeah, and exactly what does that have to do with the oppression and indiscriminate murder of black people by police in this country?
This is a complete non-sequitur so how bout this: American black people are far more privileged than slaves in India or Saudi Arabia
Or the fact that slavery just changed from chattel slavery to incarcerative slavery, as written in the 13th ammendment. We never outlawed slavery, just expanded who could be a potential slave
Unironically cancel the human race, return to monke.
Spanish conquest makes the history of the US look like child’s play. Only 5% of the people taken from a Africa came to the US.
No… Throughout history slavery has taken many forms, most of them being far more merciful than America’s. Sorry bud, but our country is relatively unique in its form of slavery. Some have been worse sure, but American slavery was one of the worse ever, especially for its length of time.
Sorry bud. Bad things happening to people is normal.
Sorry bud, but you can't dismiss the dark history of this capitalist state with just, "bad things happening to people is normal."
Are you tripping balls right now? No one's dismissing anything.
Ever heard of Brazil?
I don't remember the U.S going into towns, killing all able bodied men, and then selling the rest into slavery. Slavery in America was definitely terrible but it wasn't particularly bad. Also, as mentioned in another comment, slavery in Brazil existed.
oooo yeah let’s diminish a group of people who clearly have it far harder in almost every capacity of life by saying “all history has been bad”. you’re legitimately missing chromosomes, aren’t you?
This isn't twitter. Fuck off.
Idk man, the transatlantic slave trade might literally be the worst thing humanity has ever done. I mean obviously slavery has existed for millennia, but the transatlantic slave trade was on a whole different level. The number of enslaved is somewhere in the low hundreds of millions, and it literally laid the foundation for modern capitalism. It was a world historic event with very few parallels.
Typical American worldview, even your atrocities have to be the best.
I'm not just talking about the US, I'm talking about new world slavery in general. The US only accounted for a small percentage of the overall slave trade, the biggest destinations were the Carribean and Brazil.
Best estimates for the slave trade was ~15 million people were transported to the new world.
I don't want to get in to a whole thing about which genocide or enslavement was worse, but compared to some other world events, 15 million over 300 years is rookie numbers.
Slaves imported from Africa only constituted a small minority of the total number of slaves in the new world. The vast majority were born into slavery there. Just looking at the US, between the ban on the importation of slaves in 1808, and the start of the Civil War in 1860, the number of slaves grew from about 440k, to over four million. Even being incredibly generous, and assuming all of those slaves in 1808 were African born (which is highly unlikely given how much more economical domestic slave breeding generally was), we're looking at a rate of roughly 9-10 slaves born domestically for every one imported slave, in only two generations.
It's obviously difficult to extrapolate from that number given that obviously not all of ~15 million slaves imported to the new world will have arrived at the same time, but I don't think an estimate somewhere in the low hundreds of millions is at all unreasonable.
Also worth keeping in mind that — at least looking at Brazil and the Caribbean, which together constituted about 75% of the overall slave trade — the majority of slaves arrived after 1800, because of the explosion in the coffee market. Of about 5 million slaves imported to Brazil, only an estimated 1.7m were imported between 1700 and 1800. Prior to that, indigenous slaves were more prevalent — and they too, are not to be ignored in accounting for the total mortality of new world slavery, especially given how many of them died from European and African diseases.
Chattel slavery is absolutely horrifying, and certainly more front-and-center for us here in the U.S., but it did not lay the foundations for modern capitalism. The free market gospel is directly opposed to the medieval structures of chattel slavery. A man should earn a fair wage for his work, was the idea. You'll note that the southern economy did not develop extensively even in its most lucrative years, as wealthy southern slaveowners (presiding over a hideous wealth gap) just funneled their profits into buying more slaves. That "capital" was destroyed in the Civil War. The making of modern capitalism, somewhat ironically, had much more to do with the awarding of federal government contracts which began in the war years, in service of defeating the CSA, and increased in number and magnitude as the decades progressed. Carnegie and Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan all got rich during the war, and even richer afterwards.
Slavery absolutely was critical to the primitive accumulation of capital, which is, by definition, the foundations of modern capitalism (though you're right that industrial capitalism did indeed eventually supersede it). Marx discusses new world slavery quite explicitly in Volume 1.
Edit: Chapter 31, if you're interested.
You're right and I'm wrong. Lost sight of the big picture there. Thanks for the read.
No worries, hope you enjoy it.
From what Iv read the percentage brought to the U.S constituted about 5 percent of the total Transatlantic Trade, with an estimated 600K from 1619 to when importation was banned in 1808.
The vast majority of is slaves in the new world were born there, not imported. It’s hard to give an exact number, but as some indication, there were 440k slaves in the US in 1808, by 1860 that number had risen to over 4 million. And as you said, the US only accounted for a small percentage of overall slave trade. The popularity of indigenous slaves in South America and the Caribbean, especially prior to the 19th century, needs to be considered as well.
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There are too many to count. Some genocides and mass enalavements that come to mind (though nowhere near exhaustive) are Alexander's conquest of Asia, Caesar's conquest of Gaul and the Roman imperial conquest generally, the whole system of feudalism and serfdom that existed in Europe and Russia. The 30 years war, the 7 years war, the various peasant revolts in early modern Europe. Dozens of rebellions and revolts in India and China, but specifically the boxer rebellion.
All had death tolls in to the millions in a comparatively short amount of time.
I guess my objection to thinking of the transatlantic slave trade as singularly the worst thing humanity has ever done is that it is completely ignorant of the material context in which it took place. Tens of millions of native Americans died as a result of European disease, leaving America denuded of cheap labour. The rich landowning assholes who were developing their plantations needed labour, so they had Africans shipped in. It was expensive to ship people over so to ensure a return on investment the Africans were enslaved.
The thing is though, the deprivations suffered by slaves in the new world weren't unique. Slavery wasn't too different from the serfdom of Europe or Asia. Slavery was certainly more brutal than serfdom, but it was the same basic material structure of oppression. Serfs were tied to the land and any attempt to escape was punished severely. Peasant revolts on more than one occasion left millions dead as retribution.
The structure of oppression within slavery existed throughout the world, and while the transatlantic slave trade was particularly barbaric, it wasn't unique to the point that it should be treated as an unprecedented historical event.
Id say conditions during the Roman Republic or early Empire while it was expanding and thus had plenty of cheap chattels to go around where generally worse or equivalent for most depending on where you ended up. No rights, Masters had absolute right of life and death, and rebellions (of which there where a lot) resulted in very bad endings. Sure there where privileged Slaves in some places, but ending up in the Mines and Farms was a eventual death sentence. And given the market being awash, life was very very cheap with less incentive to maintain a investment. In some cases such slavery was the legal death sentence.
Most estimates put the number of slaves in the ran empire at its peak at around 5 million, in the new world we’re looking at an order of magnitude beyond that, and a status that also lasted centuries.
No it is definitely not. Just the mongol conquests in one century led to almost 50 million dead and millions more enslaved in a world with a much smaller population than now. The thirty years war killed 12 million. Over a million just Russians were enslaved by the crimean khanate. The Chinese have a war every century or 2 that kills millions. The Muslim conquests of India led to tens of millions dead. 90% of native American population being wiped out and the remaining enslaved. Over a million gauls killed and more enslaved by ceaser. East African slave trade with Muslim powers. Barbary slave trade. How the Chinese and Japanese have treated Korea throughout it's history. French religious wars killing a million. Assyrian treatment of conquered peoples. I could go on and on. Transatlantic slave trade was obviously bad but I don't see it as anything special. Only American media and education puts it at the forefront because of its importance to new world history
The Mongol conquests are probably the only comparable historical event. When you consider new world slavery in its entirety, it's easily comparable to anything this side of WWII, and possibly a good deal higher than that, depending on how you decide to define mortality. If one considers a person dying under bondage regardless of the cause as counting towards the overall mortality rate (which I believe you absolutely should) then we're likely looking at a number somewhere between 100 and 200 million — though for obvious reasons it's impossible to say precisely.
And that's just slaves in the new world, not even taking into consideration the violence the slave trade fuelled in the African continent itself, or diseases transmitted to the natives by the African slaves and their slavers.
If you use this metric it's mortality rate is not that much different than other slave systems used throughout history. 10-15% of Romes entire 60million population were slaves, this status quo through 4 centuries of generation change would yield higher numbers. Again, this is coming from a world with a smaller overall population and smaller amount of avenues for slave supply. 17 million people were sold into slavery in the Arab slave trade vs the 12 in the transatlantic slave trade. It lasted longer and slaves inherited their position. Numbers should be even higher than the 100-200 million you cite. And this is only an extension ancient middle eastern slavery which would increase the numbers into almost inconceivable levels. Mughal slavery in India led to the enslavement of millions of Hindu who wouldn't inherit their position if they converted. Then you have the definition of slavery and of that description could extend to peoples in other social positions. THEN you could look to modern slavery which makes all of these numbers look like a joke
You don't know anything about Mughal India.
I wrote my bachelor's thesis on early modern persianite economics largely focusing on 17th Bengal. Please be specific on what aspect I am getting wrong
It's spelled "muggle"
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If you've got suggestions on specific "history books," I'm all ears. I have a hard time believing many will refute the historical significance of slavery in the new world, but I'm open to counterarguments. Somewhere around 12 millions slaves were imported into the new world — about as many people as died in WWI — and from them, generations more were born into slavery, causing the total number of slaves to grow by an order of magnitude every 50 years or so. The wealth they generated laid the foundations for contemporary capitalism. It's hard to think of anything that compares apart from, as I've said elsewhere, WWII, or the Mongol Conquests.
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Lmao the first ones that come up a Guns Germs and Steal, Sapiens, and People’s History.
Surely these aren’t your actual recommendations?
Is this satire?
No, it's pretty much true. Slavery in the new world slavery killed 10s of millions directly, well into the 100s of millions if you consider the total number of people who were born into and died under bondage, and laid the foundations for modern capitalism. It was a world historic phenomenon the significance of which is only really rivalled by the likes of WWII, and the Mongol conquests.
What's your source on "hundreds of millions"? The academic consensus is 12.0-12.8 mn between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Edit: never mind, I didn't realise you were including ones born domestically
What the hell kind of equivalency is this? The unique system of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery that you were born into was unlike any other slave system and to deny otherwise is the height of white supremacist apologia
Chattel slavery has existed on literally every continent except Antarctica. It was practiced by the native american tribes of the Pacific northwest the early han Chinese empires and continues to this day in several parts of Africa. I understand that people will try to justify their own racist ideals by pointing out the flaws of the rest of the world but trying to assert that chattel slavery is a uniquely european institution is grossly innaccurate.
I think the real issue today is that the US never outlawed slavery. The 13th ammendment clearly states that they just widened the definition so anyone of any color can be made a slave, if they aren't rich enough. We just changed from chattel to incarcerative slavery
Horror, suffering and death is the rule in human history not the exception. You're claiming that this example of human suffering was somehow special compared to the rest of history?
Yea. Just like how the Holocaust was special compared to the countless other examples at expelling jews or other minorities from a country.
There is no end to human ingenuity when it comes to death and suffering. Dropping atomic bombs on cities was pretty inventive. Training thousands of Latin American fascists how to torture was unique. Dumping cheap cocaine on black neighborhoods was original. We're good at this.
I fail to see how Amer*ca being evil on other occasions makes the trans-atlantic slave trade not special.
Everybody is evil. Hes giving you various examples and you keep going back to USA. USA is a fucking new country, civilization is full of horrific sadness and tragedy...and with that, I guess every person in history is horrible, and should not be remembered.
Every kind of human atrocity is unique. But there's nothing unique about atrocities. They're practically the only universal thing in human history.
Again, there are things unique about some atrocities. See rape of nanking or the flattening of various Japanese civilian-filled cities for another example of an atrocity where I don't want to start to get into why they're special since you most likely already know.
And in any case, why would you want to just dismiss these atrocities as just some human instict as if there wasn't a lot of carefully calculated, malevolent, revenge-lusting planning not just plain Greed or whatever that compelled them. What is the point in that?
Who's dismissing anything? The absurd thing is that you think it's possible to adjudicate the relative terror of atrocities throughout history, as though the worst one "wins."
Atrocities are the normal state of affairs. Do you know what ordinary war was like for ordinary people throughout history? Rape, murder, starvation and slavery. Read about what the Soviets did to the Germans during their occupation.
I think it’s fair to say the holocaust was special because it was genocide on industrial scale. The same way WWI and WWII are special because of the industrialization of near total war.
And I think it's fair to say the trans-atlantic slave trade was special. Before that slavery, wasn't really "a thing" in the West but with the industrialization and so much unused and cheap land in America with little remaining local workforce, Europeans started to ship out slaves around the world en masse to build up like a third of a continent.
It's pretty obvious that it's """special""" but it seems like people in this thread are convinced all slavery is the same and since Muslims, Vikings and Third Worlders did it (on a much smaller scale), it's all good. Oh you think we are evil? What about the things xyz did 1400 years ago!!!!!
Another woke liberal retard enters the chat, with a malignantly ignorant statement and racist self righteous absolutism.
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Ha gottem
Completely wrong. Stop spreading bullshit and talking about subjects you clearly know nothing about
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